Rupert Murdoch Admits Phone Hacking Cover Up - And Plays The Victim

Rupert Murdoch testified earlier this week in the British inquiry into phone hacking by News Corp. He admitted there had been a cover up at his now-defunct tabloid, News of the World. But rather than take responsibility, he played dumb and blamed underlings for concealing the true nature of the misdoings from him. Jon Stewart took on Murdoch's dubious attempt to avoid blame. "My God, this scandal goes all the way to the bottom!"

Murdoch, the News Corp chairman and chief executive, giving his second day of evidence to the inquiry in London, said he was "misinformed and shielded" from what was going on at the News of the World, adding that there was a "cover-up".

...Murdoch said there were "one or two very strong characters" on the now-defunct Sunday paper who, according to reported statements, had forbidden people from talking to Rebekah Brooks and James Murdoch, at the time News International chief executive and chairman respectively.

Murdoch said a News of the World editor was appointed – referring to Colin Myler, although he did not name him at this point – "with specific instructions to find out what was going on". "He did, I believe, put in two or three new steps of regulation but never reported back that there was more hacking than we had been told."

Nick Davies, the Guardian reporter who broke the News Corp. phone-hacking scandal, wrote in an incisive column that Murdoch seems unable to manage the trouble he is in.

This is a man who is used to getting his way. He is not used to being confronted by people who have the power, the skill and the simple effrontery to challenge him – and to keep on challenging him. On Wednesday morning, he walked in with all the protection that his advisers could give him in the previous days of detailed briefings and endless rehearsals. By Thursday morning, there were times when he had lost the script, lost the plot and he simply sat there, with nobody to help him and no way out.

...First, as he found himself pushed into one corner after another, he fell back on aggression as the easiest form of defence and proceeded to create or, at least to confirm, the enmity of a string of people who may well now choose to join the attack on him. He went out of his way to smear the Daily Telegraph, took several swipes at the Daily Mail and gratuitously insulted Le Monde. He laid into former friends, including Gordon Brown and Paul Dacre; and former employees, including the former Sun editor David Yelland, his former in-house lawyers Alastair Brett and Tom Crone, and even his former housekeeper ("a very strange bird"). If any of them strikes back, he may live to regret that tactic.

Second, Murdoch may have finished his evidence, but Leveson has not yet finished with him. Later this year, Leveson will produce a report over which Murdoch will have no control at all. Murdoch has stood by his denials on a cluster of core questions – that he never knew about illegal activity at the News of the World, that he does not approve of unethical journalism, that he never sought favours from politicians and never received any. Over the last two days, the media mogul has done his best to enforce those denials on his troublesome inquisitors.

As if to underscore the point, Jon Stewart did a scathing take-down of Murdoch, too. Mimicking Murdoch's claim of ignorance, Stewart quipped, "I'm no evil-genius Randolph Hearst-type figure. I'm like the Australian Mr. Magoo."

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It will soon become apparent that the massive corruption personally orchestrated by Wrinkled Rupert reached into the United States. Fux Noise, the NY Post and the WSJ will of course ignore the whole thing. Instead they will continue to spew endlessly on why that socialist, muslim dark guy needs to be thrown out of the White House.